Obama v. McCain: Web Presence 2.0

A study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism takes a look at McCain and Obama's web presence. The Study found that the candidates official campaign sites are" quite advanced beyond anything" seen in any other elections. Some interesting data they recovered is quite revealing, beyond face value.

• Obama’s site links to mainstream media news stories about his candidacy more frequently than does McCain’s, which tends to bypass the mainstream media and link in its “news” section instead to campaign-generated press releases. That has ebbed somewhat recently, as the site has begun linking to news stories about Palin.

• The word “change”—the motto of the Obama campaign—is now less prominent on the information pages of the Obama site than on McCain’s. On the Republican’s site “change” is among the top 20 most frequently used words.

• The Obama Web site provides far more text than McCain’s, by virtue of the extensive archive of Obama’s speeches (in August alone, 50,676 words on Obama’s Web site versus 21,021 on McCain’s). If you take speeches by both candidates out of the mix, Obama’s site still features more words than McCain’s, but they are closer.

• The McCain campaign has fully integrated his vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin—both textually and visually—into the Web site’s home page, while the Obama home page denotes his vice presidential pick, Joe Biden, much less prominently.